Havana – Cubans may not have McDonald’s or Jack in the Box, but they do have pizza in a basket.
Customers shout orders to a terrace kitchen atop a 1930s-era two-story building, and the pizza is lowered to the street in a rattan basket.
Pizza Celina is among the more inventive places Cubans go to augment food rations. Elsewhere in Havana, street vendors hawk peanuts, popcorn and a snack known as chicharrones de macarones – macaroni pork rinds – made by boiling pasta, drying it in the sun and then frying it.
Near the University of Havana, students line up at lunchtime outside a building with peeling pink paint to shout orders for pizza with tomato sauce and cheese for 8 pesos, about 38 cents. A little bit more buys ham or sausage topping.
The basket-on-a-rope delivery method is popular among those who share and sell goods in apartment buildings without working elevators.
“We come here because it’s good, it’s fast and it’s cheap,” said Laura, a 20-year-old history student. She wouldn’t give a last name, uncomfortable talking with a foreign reporter about an issue as political as food.
She said she often eats for less at the university cafeteria, but the food there isn’t as good.
The only thing close to a fast-food chain in Cuba is the state-run Rapidito or the food counter at Cupet gas stations, which both sell hot dogs and fried chicken most Cubans cannot afford because they are priced in the “convertible pesos” used by foreigners.
A Rapidito hot dog at 1 convertible peso costs more than a day’s pay for a Cuban earning a typical monthly salary of 350 pesos ($16.60).
Cubans get a heavily subsidized monthly food basket of beans, rice, potatoes, eggs, a little meat and other goods. That, along with other subsidized meals such as workplace lunches, provides about two-thirds of the 3,300 calories the government estimates Cubans eat daily.
